Corps of (Network and Security) Engineers

A couple of posts ago, in the article “Tweets Of War”, I discussed about the possibility to use consumer mobile devices and Internet connectivity as a kind of weapons, for instance to tweet the positions of enemy troops in order to address allied bombs as did, for instance by some rebels in Libya (simply go to twitter.com and issue a search for the tweets by #LibyanDictator.

Of course this fact raises the question of the importance of internet connectivity during military actions, and, as a consequence, also of the importance of information security, which may not be limited to “simple” message encryption: as an example, referring to the above mentioned example, we cannot authenticate tweets so we may not exclude a priori that they are spoofed tweets in order to drive the allied bombs towards the wrong target (we might always think to authenticate them with a Comodo Certificate!).

As a matter of fact, maintaining the internet connectivity has become a primary priority, that is the reason why U.S. army, for instance, is thinking to implement appropriate technologies and countermeasures in order to maintain or restore Internet connectivity during military actions. Times change and I would almost say that what was once considered the corps of engineers, today, in a mobile warfare, should be called Corps of (network and security) Engineers. What the Corps of Engineers do in the real battlefield (build connections and bridges), the Corps of (network and security) Engineers do in the Cyber-battlefield (build internet connections and connectivity bridges).

Strictly speaking, why maintaining the Internet Connectivity is so important? Of course, the main reason is for the purpose of propaganda in terms of “evangelism to the cause”, gathering of the faithful, and why not, foreign public involvement. We have seen so far, how much has been important (and keeps to be important) for the winds of change blowing in the Maghreb, the role of mobile technologies and social networks, at the beginning for spreading the movements (also beyond the boundaries) and then to bear witness to the World of what was really happening, in all the cases playing a crucial role for the advent of the Odissey Dawn operation (while I am writing, you only need to go to Twitter for being spectator of the dramatics occurrences in Libya: from the reporting of events to requests for help, doctors, etc.). This role is much more important during the military operations where, typical case, both parties claim real or alleged success in combat operations, or provide each other the responsibility for civilian casualties.

But a closer look shows an even more important factor, apparently secondary, but probably potentially decisive in a situation similar to the one occurring in Libya where you are fighting a civil war between rebels and loyalists. In a similar context the Internet may play a primary role for conveying PsyOps messages, not only to encourage citizens to join the protests, as it is happening in Syria, where Facebook is being used to gather followers to revolt; but also for opposite purposes convincing rebels to disarm and return back to their families without further bloodshed. This does not sounds new since such a similar operation had been attempted from the Egyptian Government (actually with a tragicomic outcome) by overtaking the main mobile operators and flooding their mobile subscribers with propagandistic messages which were supposed to encourage the younger people to support the falling government and abandon the protests (a complete report at this link in Italian). One might say that this is not a new concept (read for instance the following article issued in 2001), the difference is that, in 2011, both the transmission technologies and, most of all, the reception technologies (read mobile devices) are much more sophisticated and spread making this kind of operation really effective if compared to how it could be ten years go.

Of course there is a further dramatic question to be addressed for psyops messages propagated through the Internet, and it is the one pertaining to information security, some aspect of which I have already addressed in this post. On one hand, whatever message is transmitted through the Internet may be suitable to man-in-the middle attacks and hence hacked if not properly secured throughout the propagation process: hacking in this case would correspond, for instance, to alter, if not invert, the content. What if the above mentioned tweets were spoofed providing false coordinates? Maybe am I flying with the fantasy if I say that the authors could have negotiated a priori with the recipients some predefined semantics with which to transmit the messages.

On the other hand, it is likely that the Corps of (Network and Security) Engineers will not have to worry about only to establish and maintain the internet connectivity in military operations, but also to face, in a cyber-battlefiedl, enemy malware weapons and/or jamming of Denial-Of-Service tools specifically conceived to attack psyops sources at the root (it is appropriate to say!) in order to make them unusable. In any case, they will not have to underestimate in any way the impact of hacking from a psyops perspective (in favor or against, (just think of echo raised from the recent Libyan TV hacking).

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In this blog I express my personal opinion, which does not necessarily reflects the opinion of my organization, about events and news or interest, concerning information security, winking to mobile world and, why not, to some curious personal event.

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